Dried pastas which have cracking or deformation are not visually beautiful, and the commercial value is drastically impaired. Particularly in the case of long pasta such as spaghetti, cracking is likely to cause damage such as breakage and chipping of pasta. Therefore, prevention of cracking is important.
Cracking is primarily attributable to uneven drying in a drying step. In view of this, conventionally, a method for preventing cracking or stabilizing a shape of dried pasta by eliminating uneven drying of pasta has been proposed.
For example, Patent Literature 1 describes a method for stabilizing the shape of pasta, comprising increasing the percentage of water content of pasta by 0.1 to 2% by adding water to the surface of the pasta before final drying in the step of drying the pasta, and immediately thereafter, decreasing temperature of the pasta. Patent Literature 2 describes a method for improving the quality of dried pastas, comprising maintaining dried pastas in an atmosphere at 50 to 95° C. Patent Literature 3 describes a method for drying pasta, comprising the steps of processing fresh pasta with saturated vapor at 75 to 80° C. and drying the fresh pasta at a temperature of 50 to 60° C. until the percentage of water content of 11 to 12% is reached.
However, in the case of the method of Patent Literature 1, controlling the water content of pasta by addition of water is difficult. Also, the actual situation is that fully satisfactory results have not been achieved with other methods as well in respect of prevention of cracking.